Federal Government Contractors Need SEO

What Does SEO Have to Do With B2G Contractors?﻿

The 27th & 28th of
March, this week, Solvability hosts the Florida GovCon NextGen Summit in Tampa,
Florida. The weather is perfect this
time of year. So are the speakers and
attendees to the small and very focused event.

What is SEO and why do government
contractors need it?

Search engine optimization is a B2G technique
used in web design and digital marketing to help ensure your product or
services can be found by government buyers. Many government contractors start
off by targeting the Federal Agencies in Washington DC only to find out that
many of the organizations they are targeting can reside far from the
mothership.

A good example is this weeks GovCon
Summit. Washington DC agencies will be
represented but many of the attendees will be from local commands residing at McDill Airforce
Base. The base is home to CENTCOM and SOCOM.
There will be speakers from SOCOM’s contracting office and mall business
programs. Representatives from NAWCTSD,
NASA, GSA, SOF Core, ASMPP will also be speaking.

If you are a government contractor attending
this conference or any of the other dozen conferences put on by organizations
supporting Federal Contractors you know you can’t get one-on-one time with all
of the key people in attendance. Even if
you do the typical response from the expert will be give me your business card
and I’ll try to remember you after I get back
to my office on Monday.

So you have spoken to the expert and they took
your business card. You also got their
card and rush back to the office and give it to your business development
team. You tell them “call these
government agencies and see if we can get a government contract for our
services.” Of course I am being a
little feseasious at this point but that isn’t far from what actually happens.

The problem is the individuals that are
speaking at this conference will be explaining how to do business with them and
what their agencies are looking for in a qualified contractor. The actual targets for B2G marketing and lead
generation are the prime contractors, program managers, and others in the
government responsible for finding the solutions to the problems, writing the
specifications, and evaluating the proposals.

How to reach the government
agency buyers?

Typical business development consists of a lot
of time and expense to find potential contracts, buyers, and partners. There are multiple tools offered that help
with teaming, identifying opportunities, and lists of agencies contacts. This approach helps define the target
audience but still requires a huge amount of time and expense to track down
leads or get an audience with individuals at the right time that they might
have an interest.

What is the answer? If you are among the estimated 7,000
contractors serving the US Federal Agencies you need a plan for them to find
you. That should include way to validate
your past performance, specific expertise, and the problems you solve. You can do this with marketing services that
include B2G contractor SEO, social media, and targeted digital ad campaigns.

A view from the government
procurement side.

Still not convinced that your business needs
to spend money on SEO services? This in
my personal experience with procuring equipment and services while a government
civilian employee working for the Office of the Secretary of Defense in the Green Zone in Baghdad, Iraq. I was a GS-15 Management/Program Analyst hire
to support an economic stabilization mission that wasn’t meeting its
deadlines. The new team of engineers
brought on board had little government procurement experience. The goal remained to “spend” the $54 million
dollars allocated by congress for supporting the privatization of 28 State
Owned Factories and economic stabilities project spread across the country of
Iraq. We had three months to the end of
the fiscal year!

Without going through too much details of the
difficulties of working with 28 disparate entities to establish requirements
and specification for the equipment our job was to find contractors that could
furnish the materials and services.

Here is a partial list of that equipment and
services needing procurement:

There were a few more that included in the $54
million budget but the larger $190 discretionary budget for operations like IT
systems for compounds, living units, telecommunications, food services, and of
course security.

We needed Google Search to get this done.

We had a short period of time and limited
resources to find the solutions to the problems. Initially we ran to the
KO/contract officers. They told us they
don’t find the equipment and services, they just write the contracts and we
better adhere to the FAR. Federal
Acquisition Regulations

We tried accessing the McDill project
management and procurement systems. (we were under CentCom Command in
Baghdad.) Unfortunately between slow
internet speeds (remember we are in Iraq where at the time the internet was by
satellite) It was time to Google!

It was a major challenge even when we found a
website that looked like it had the information we needed it would take forever
to get through the pages and menus to find the details we needed to make
decisions. Few, if any of the websites
were designed for search.

Designing a website to be found in a search
for your products or services is only one of the important goals of SEO. If
they can’t find you they can’t do business with you.

The next goal for SEO is to make the website
easy to navigate. Help your visitors find the information they need quickly.

If you are a B2G contractor you website needs
to ensure that you are targeting the right visitors, provide information they
might be looking for quickly, and make navigation or directions to get more in
depth information readily apparent.

Can they see what you do in 7 seconds? No
fluff like we solve government agencies problems.

Are
they directed to the most important parts of you website within 2 seconds? Can they see where to find past performance,
NAICS codes, Teaming Partners, Contract Vehicles?

If not you need someone to assist you with SEO
of your website. I could go on about
technical issues on your website affecting search, content generation, and
coordination with social media but I think you get the idea.